Physics Week in Review: February 21, 2015

Winter is in full force in the Northeast, so naturally science has some insights to share for those caught in the snowdrifts. For example: Don’t Jump Out of a Window Into Snow: But If You Do… it’s best to understand the physics of a snow jump.

The Quantum Mechanics of Fate and the Question of of Whether or Not Causality is a Two-Way Street. How time travel might explain some of science’s biggest puzzles. Related: Time runs bizarre in quantum world where past is changed by the future. The future might affect the past in some quantum physics situations.

Superposition Size Limits: New experiments with quantum random walks could determine the upper size limit for quantum superposition effects. Per Motherboard: "The boundary between the realm of the very small, where things might exist in superpositions of many things, and our world of the very big and the very organized is not quite as settled as we'd like."

The Math of Powerball: It’s the richest lottery game in the USA. When is it worth it to play? "When you say worth it, by the way, it has a very specific meaning when it comes to mathematics. It means that the amount you can expect to win, on average, is greater than the amount you have to bet in order to play."

Iconic image from Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" album (1979), based on pulsar data.

Pop Culture Pulsar: the fascinating Origin Story of Joy Division’sUnknown Pleasures Album Cover. "When folks refer to the ... cover, they generally just say that it shows a series of radio frequency periods from the first pulsar discovered. But what does that really mean? How does the physicality of a pulsar result in radio frequencies that translate into the famous stacked plot? What produced the data, how was it collected, who created the plot and what is its significance?"

Cosmologists Discovered a New Kind of Crystal by Looking at Satellite Orbits. "To be clear, Boyle and Smith are not saying that satellites flying around Earth are an actual crystal. The idea is that this particular way of arranging four artificial satellites in orbit is how this theoretical crystal would look at the atomic level. Its atoms actually move in time. Like the satellites, if you viewed them as a static image, they would look asymmetrical, but a "movie" view would reveal highly choreographed atomic movements."

The Romance That Led To A Legendary Science Burn. Wolfgang Pauli's wife left him for (gasp!) a chemist. Oh, the humanity. "Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood - with such a man I could not compete - but a chemist - such an average chemist!"

Bad air day: 'tornado in a bottle' created in a wind chamber. "We can create a 5-metre-wide tornado inside the chamber. A tornado is a combination of rotation and suction. By angling the airflow from the fans around the lower chamber we control the rotation of a tornado vortex, and we create the suction by running the six huge fans in reverse. The beauty of our tornado is that we can move it along the ground at 2 metres per second."

In Fake Universes, Evidence for String Theory. Researchers are demonstrating that, in certain contexts -- namely, universes with a fisheye geometry known as anti-de Sitter space -- string theory is the only consistent theory of quantum gravity. Might this make it true?

Too Many Worlds: Nobody knows what happens inside quantum experiments, per this rather snarky article by Philip Ball. So why are some so keen to believe in parallel universes? Sean Carroll responds with a clear explanation of why these are The Wrong Objections to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. "Maybe someday the public discourse about MWI will catch up with the discussion that experts have among themselves, evolve past self-congratulatory sneering about all those unobservable worlds, and share in the real pleasure of talking about the issues that matter." Related: The Philosophical Incoherence of the “Too Many Worlds” Objection. "Physics is about fundamental rules and interactions, and those are the only things you can treat rigorously. And Many-Worlds is, in fact, a rigorous and logical treatment of these issues."

Infinity Is a Beautiful Concept – And It's Ruining Physics, says Max Tegmark. Related: If space goes on infinitely far, why would we expect there to be copies of all of us out there? Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene explains why the notion isn't as crazy as it sounds.

Controlling water drops on the Space Station with LEGOs and electricity. "What do you do when you've got free time on the International Space Station and a bunch of legos? Build a Van de Graaff generator out of lego bricks, a rubber band, and a drill of course! In 2012 astronaut Don Pettit did exactly this when he was on board the ISS; he then searched around for objects to electrify, little knowing his fun experiments would lead to a full research paper on charged water droplets (published this month in Physical Review Letters) and some very real-world applications."

Paul Gauguin's "Nativity (Mother and Child Surrounded by Five Figures)," c. 1902. Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Robert Allerton.

Gaugin as Experimental Printmaker Analyzed. "The techniques and materials Gauguin used to create his unusual and complex graphic works are little studied but a team from Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago used a simple light bulb, an SLR camera and computational power to uncover new details of Gauguin's printmaking process -- how he formed, layered and re-used imagery to make 19 unique graphic works in the Art Institute's collection."

Is An Infinite Amount of Oil Enough? tl;dr: no. We still hit peak oil in 2070, i.e., in 55 years. "At that time, we will have consumed (used or whatever you oil people want to call it) all the oil that we have found. After that year we will have a higher demand for oil than we can find it. So, in 2070 bad things happen if we are using oil at the same increasing rate that we are using it now. Remember, this is a crude oil model for the oil “found” and oil “used”. In this model, there is an infinite amount of oil but we still get to a bad place."

The science of theatre: Alan Alda’s eureka moment. He may be adored for his portrayal of Hawkeye the wisecracking doctor in MASH, but Alan Alda has a second passion: science. Which is why he has written a play, Radiance, about the hounding of Marie Curie.

The First Field Recordings (1890). "Anthropologist Jesse Fewkes (1850-1930) was the first to use the Edison phonograph for recording legends, songs, stories, rituals and so on of North American Indians, making him a pioneer in field recording."

The Math Learner's Checklist: "If you checked everything, then stop checking things! You didn’t actually experience all of those, did you? You’re just a compulsive box-checker. Stop cheapening the significance of the check."

Seduced by calculus: The 2010 Fields Medal was won by a French mathematician captivated by the crowning mathematical achievement of the Enlightenment.

John Dee was the 16th Century's Real-Life Gandalf. Queen Elizabeth I’s court advisor was the foremost scientific genius of the 16th century, laying the foundation of modern science. Then teamed up with a disreputable, criminal psychic and things really got rolling.

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Physics Week in Review: February 28, 2015

By Jennifer Ouellette on February 28, 2015

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Subscribe Now!Physics Week in Review: February 21, 2015Winter is in full force in the Northeast, so naturally science has some insights to share for those caught in the snowdrifts. For example: Don’t Jump Out of a Window Into Snow: But If You Do… it’s best to understand the physics of a snow jump.

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